The cost of the non-competitive contracts the U.S. military has tripled in the last 10 years, now tallying up to $140 billion of taxpayer money per year on quick solution defense spending.

Though competition amongst companies saves taxpayer money, the stated urgent nature of the military’s needs pushed aside fiscal concerns. In 2001, the Pentagon’s non-competitive contracts cost around $50 billion. In 2010, nearly a decade after the war on terror began, that spending has risen to around $140 billion. Only 55 percent of contracts awarded in the first two quarters of 2011 were competitive.

If you’re like me, now that we’re in the week that federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal. Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me, or have already finished and know how much you have paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and consider how much of your money goes to pay for our bloated and largely useless and pointless military.

The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which has to be voted by Congress by this Oct. 1, looks to be about $3 trillion, not counting the funds collected for Social Security (since the Vietnam War, the government has included the Social Security Trust Fund in the budget as a way to make the cost of America’s imperial military adventures seem smaller in comparison to the total cost of government). Meanwhile, the military share of the budget works out to about $1.6 trillion.

That figure includes the Pentagon budget request of $717 billion, plus an estimated $200 billion in supplemental funding (called “overseas contingency funding” in euphemistic White House-speak), to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, some $40 billion or more in “black box” intelligence agency funding, $94 billion in non-DOD military spending (that would include stuff like military activies funded through NASA, military spending by the State Department, etc., miilitary-related activities within the Dept. of Homeland Security, etc.), $123 billion in veterans benefits and health care spending, and $400 billion in interest on debt raised to pay for prior wars and the standing military during peacetime (whatever that is!).

The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out war footing.

The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans.

Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C. says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008.

For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for defense in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That’s more than all the state governments collect.

Thanks to a head’s up from Taxpayers for Common Sense, I have taken a quick look at the just now available 2010 DOD Appropriations Conference Report. Remember: this is the bill with the final say on the money; it overrides any money amounts in the DOD Authorization bill, now law, from the armed services committees.

Unlike the HASC and SASC (House and Senate armed services committees), the appropriations porkers have not changed their squiggly little tails; they have continued to raid the Military Personnel and O&M accounts to pay for their pork.

What I see is the following:

$1.9 billion in gross reductions to the Military Personnel (pay) account based on the arbitrary justification that there was need for an “undistributed adjustment,” or in some cases “reimbursables.”

$2.1 billion in net reductions from the O&M account in the base bill; $1.4 billion of that reduction was based on phony justifications (indirectly based on some flimsy GAO analysis never made public), such as “historic underexecution.” (If you want to review my analysis of this flimsy GAO analysis , see it at http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/printversion.cfm?documentID=4535.)

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees also raided the direct war fighting O&M account in Title IX of the bill by $1.5 billion.

The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a massive military spending bill to defray annual expenses, fund operations in Afghanistan, and pay for the troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Lawmakers voted 395 to 34 for the 636.3-billion-dollar package, which does not include monies for President Barack Obama’s recently announced decision to send 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan in a bid to turn that conflict around.

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama Wednesday signed the fiscal 2010 National Defence Authorization Act during a ceremony at the White House.

Obama hailed the act, which contains $680.2 billion in military budget authority, as transformational legislation that targets wasteful defence spending.

The authorization act contains $130 billion to fund overseas contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and it also provides $6.7 billion for thousands of all-terrain, mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles now arriving in Afghanistan.